Trade-offs and the Left

While watching the hilarity of Nancy Pelosi squirm and lie under questions regarding what she did or did not know regarding waterboarding, it struck me that a lot of the problems we now face are due to a single root problem that has almost wholly been created by the left:  the “magic bean” solution to problems.

What do I mean by this?  Real problems have complex solutions that require complicated trade-offs.  A problem that does not have any trade-space is not really a problem.  For instance, say I love Starbucks coffee in the morning.  However, I discover that I can get a better tasting cup of coffee for half the price at McDonalds, which happens to be located right next to the Starbucks.  What possible reason would I buy a Starbucks coffee?  If the McDonalds’ coffee is better, cheaper, and the commute is similar, then the solution is obvious, go to McDonalds.

Unfortunately, real problems rarely come in this form.  More likely, the problem would require a trade-space.  For a simple illustration of this, let’s say that the McDonalds’ coffee tastes better and is half the cost, but the commute is an extra 15 minutes.  Well, 15 minutes is a lot in the morning when you are rushing out of the door late for a meeting, not to mention that the gas cost of an extra 15 minutes on the road might hover around $2.  With the commute included, the cost of the two products is similar, but the McDonalds coffee still tastes better.  However, now I have to balance out an extra 15 minutes in traffic against better tasting coffee.  The solution is no longer obvious and various people would choose different options.  Some people would value better tasting coffee, others would value the extra 15 minutes.

How does coffee choice relate to politics?  The political choices that we face are immensely more complicated that the choice of what brand of coffee to drink in the morning, with much broader trade-spaces.  However, if you were to listen to the left, you would be wholly unaware that a trade-space even existed for many of the problems we face.  Each problem is treated as though the solution is obvious rather than a complicated balance between competing requirements.  To give three relevant examples:  torture, energy, and health care.

Does torture work?  To listen to the modern left, not only does torture undermine our moral authority and reduce our world standing (whatever the hell that means), but it doesn’t even work and it produces completely unreliable information!  Framed like the above, there is no trade-space and no reason to actually contemplate using torture for any reason.  If it doesn’t work, what’s the point?  The problem with this statement is that it rests on fundamentally flawed logic.  Torture does work, especially when the information can be corroborated with external sources.  Torture wouldn’t have been used for all of recorded human history if it simply did not work.  Even the most recent examples with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah show that waterboarding extracted far more information in a shorter period of time than non-coercive methods.  None other than Barak Obama indicated at the usefulness of the technique when he stated:

So, you’ve got a harder job, and so do I and that’s okay … Over the long term, that’s why I believe we will defeat our enemies: because we’re on the better side of history.

Why would the CIA’s job be harder if the technique was not useful?  By admitting that it will be harder to protect the nation by not using waterboarding, Obama is implicitly acknowledging that there is a trade-off.  By not using coercive techniques, we are undoubtedly exposing the nation to a higher risk of a future successful terrorist attack in exchange for whatever benefit might be bestowed by the world believing we are nicer people.

The argument between these various trade-offs is something that should be had in a mature and open democracy.  Instead, we have the absurd notion that coercion doesn’t work and only acts to negatively cast the US in foreign relations.  Why have we ended up here?  Because the left is afraid of an open and honest debate regarding these measures, because they believe given the various trade-offs, the people might decide that coercion is okay in certain situations (as polls have indicated).  Instead of having that honest debate, the argument has been ridiculously shifted to whether or not coercion even works.  The only way the left can win the argument is by recasting the facts to indicate that there exists no trade-space: we lose nothing by not using coercion, we only benefit.  The “magic bean” solution rears its ugly head.

Energy is the next big dishonest argument being had in the US at the moment.  Take for example this article from the NY Times:

The Obama administration is using Earth Day for launching another all-out effort to sell the American public and key lawmakers on “green jobs” as the solution for the United States’ environmental and economic woes.

Let’s ignore the fact that America’s economic woes were created by horrible credit policies endorsed by the Federal government and have nothing to do with energy or the environment.  Instead, let’s imagine that high energy prices were the direct cause of current economic woes.  Why hasn’t the private sector fixed the problem by buying solar panels and wind generators to power their operations?  The cost of so-called “green energy” is so prohibitively high that it cannot compete with traditional energy sources even when those energy sources double and triple in price.  Even BP, who spent millions to rebrand themselves as “Beyond Petroleum”, had drastically reduced investment in “green” technologies because the technologies are not ready to supplant fossil fuels anytime soon.

The cost of energy is the direct cost of doing business, much like the cost of labor or the cost of materials.  If energy prices increase, then the price of products or services that a company sells is going to go up.  As anyone who has read the first paragraph in an economics textbook knows, as the price of something increases, the demand decreases.  By forcing US companies to pay an energy premium, in effect, they make doing business in the US that much more expensive.  The same thing happened with labor in the US steel and auto industries.  How did that work out?

The real sham going on here is that there is no urgency to address these so-called problems immediately.  Currently known reserves of fossil fuels are sufficient to keep us moving for at least the next 75 years (41 years of oil, plus very conservative estimate of coal to oil processes).  Even if you believe the worst case hysterical predictions of global warming alarmists, over that same time period, we are only talking about a 4.8 degree change in Earth’s temperature, hardly catastrophic.  Does anyone honestly believe that we will not have better energy solutions on the table in 50 years that might actually have a chance of being cost competitive with current technologies?  This is why the left must act NOW.  In 50 years, the problem will most likely have fixed itself and there will be no need for government intervention in the energy market.  I’m reminding of an analogous problem in 19^th century America:

While the nineteenth century American city faced many forms of environmental pollution, none was as all encompassing as that produced by the horse. The most severe problem was that caused by horses defecating and urinating in the streets, but dead animals and noise pollution also produced serious annoyances and even health problems.

The environmental problems associated with horses very rapidly disappeared with the emergence of the automobile.  What looked to be an insurmountable problem was solved through technological innovation.  There is no reason to believe that there won’t be a similar innovation that does away with fossil fuels.

All of this shows that energy is a complicated problem with a complicated trade-space.  Do we wait for new technologies to be invented that make green energy competitive to fossil fuels?  Do we accept that by raising the price of energy in this country, we push businesses to operate elsewhere, in places that do not place a heavy energy burden on industry, thus losing jobs to foreign markets?  Or, do we pretend that the environmental problems are so dire that we cannot wait another moment, that green energy will simultaneously cost more but boost national employment, and that global fossil fuel markets will not respond to the absence of the largest energy user on the planet?  The “magic bean” solution.

Before I step down off of my soap box, there is one more example that I would like to illustrate: health care.  The new story on the left is that health care can be fixed by nationalization and that costs can be controlled by efficiency savings.  We can simultaneously improve quality, access and cost, despite all historical evidence that you can never move all three of these traits in the same direction at the same time.  Quality and access can be improved, but it is going to cost you.  Rationing reduces access, but frees money to improve quality and decrease costs.

So what are we missing?  Two of the biggest costs in the health care industry are related to health care provided to those nearing the end of their life, and in litigation suits.  Both of these issues are riddled with morally explosive trade-offs that can only be explored with a mature national debate, a debate the left convinces us isn’t necessary. Currently, almost 80 billion per year is spent on caring for those in the last year of their life.

Estimates show that about 27% of Medicare’s annual $327 billion budget goes to care for patients in their final year of life.

As the population ages, this fraction is only going to grow, consuming ever larger amounts of tax dollars.  Other nations with socialized health care have recognized this problem and have addressed it by rationing end of life care.  The UK has even gone to the extremes of not treating non-terminal older patients for entirely treatable problems, because they are not deemed socially worth the expenditure (a social worth, I’m sure, that does not extend to the Parliament that makes the rules for the little people).  While you can make an entirely rational argument for why older people are not worth the health care expenditure, it’s not an argument that is being made prior to health care nationalization.  Instead, all we hear is how great a national health care program will be, without any regard for the inevitable costs that will eventually force difficult decisions.

The health care industry is also riddled with lawsuits, forcing doctors to pay exorbitant malpractice insurance rates.  This exposure to lawsuits is evident to pharmaceutical companies, who directly pass their extra costs onto the consumer.

The drug maker Wyeth, for example, has set aside a reserve of $21 billion to deal with litigation related to the obesity medication Fen-Phen. Merck’s exposure to Vioxx lawsuits may total as much as $50 billion, the report notes.

While I don’t think many non-lawyers would argue that the industry is not held accountable enough by civil lawsuits, how would a government run system reduce lawyer related expenditures?  If you argue that the government cannot be sued, then you essentially reduce accountability to zero within the profession.  If you leave the system unchanged, then taxpayer funds will flow into the coffers of law firms the nation over.  Does anyone believe that this cash flow won’t become publicly charged with the government running all aspects of health care?

Health care is problem that requires a mature national debate.  With an aging population, these costs are going to be increasing dramatically unless some very difficult economic and moral choices are made.  A free market approach would allow people to choose the level of care they are comfortable with.  Are you willing to pay an extra 100 dollars a month throughout your life to ensure sound end of life care?  Would you rather have the 100 dollars?  The point is that these decisions need to be made and they require economic trade-offs.  The left is obscuring that these trade-offs exist and that they will require difficult and costly decisions.  Instead, we are left with the notion that a national health care system will increase coverage, decrease costs, and improve quality.  The “magic bean” solution.

While all of these issues are infinitely more complicated that I have described above, the point is that there are no easy no-cost decisions.  Each of these topics requires a mature open and honest debate, a debate that the left is trying to convince the nation is entirely unnecessary.  Instead, the left wants the hard decisions to be made behind closed doors by bureaucrats who will probably be held to a separate set of rules than they setup for the rest of us.  Do you trust these bureaucrats to make these decisions in the best interest of your nation and your family?  No, neither do I.